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The quantum computing bubble

ft.com

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Re: The quantum computing bubble

#81

Post by sicp-enjoyer »

cerol wrote: post #39

This is how I think about it. It's insurance money. If you're a manager of a big company like IBM, Microsoft or Google, you have to align your current product portfolio and future portfolio in such a way that shows your investor that your company will keep growing, even if your current products are stagnant. You can surely say Quantum computing won't do much in next 5 years. But what about 10 years? 20 years? 30 year…

I think you are describing the company dynamics accurately, but I can't help think this is just a terrible way to invest. No party has a concrete plan or vision for how to use it, they just throw money because there is a consensus of good feeling around it. Those good feelings were probably created through academic or corporate marketing efforts in the first place.

Re: The quantum computing bubble

#82

Post by sweezyjeezy »

marcosdumay wrote: post #73
sweezyjeezy wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think most people, including the author, would agree QC should be funded for fundamental research reasons. But that is clearly not the way it is being pitched to VC. Right now there is no clear use-case, that's what I felt he was warning against. If nothing materialises soon, he's probably correct to say this is a bubble.

> Right now there is no clear use-case Why people keep repeating that? You mean that if somebody creates a machine that can simulate chemistry and materials science in polynomial time, nobody would use it? That's crazy.

The key word being 'if' - cited research from the FT article that disclaims this: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2208.02199.pdf

I have no expertise in QC/chemistry so I can't make a judgement other than to say it doesn't seem universally agreed that QC will be a silver bullet here.

Re: The quantum computing bubble

#83

Post by mandmandam »

bluecalm wrote: post #27
mandmandam wrote: post #4

> at some point the claims will be found out and the funding will dry up. Someone hasn't been watching the cryptocurrency markets. That's partly tongue in cheek. But there are countless examples of the market remaining irrational longer than one can stay solvent. Witness the continued success of BTC and Ether, amid newer options that outperform them on every tech-related metric, often by many orders of magnitude. I c…

Crypto is a bad example because it's pretty pointless in general. You can have better, faster, more efficient, safer, easier to use tech but at the end of day you're only achieving the same thing: skipping over regulations that apply to traditional currencies but somehow don't to crypto. That's assuming good will as one can argue that creating a distributed Ponzi scheme is another goal. It turns out that to achieve t…

> it's pretty pointless in general

Tell that to Wikileaks; after Mastercard and VISA stopped letting people donate due to political pressure.

Tell that to people charged double digit percentages just for the privilege of spending hours transferring money across borders.

What about the Canadians freezing hundreds of accounts "linked" to civil protests (however much one may disagree with their cause).

People complain that micro-transactions aren't cost effective; but there are, right now, secure and decentralized, fee-less crypto techs; even quantum resistant ones, that allow for the transfer of millionths of a cent.

With no disrespect, I feel that people who say crypto has no use-case are being let down by their imagination and research skills.

> skipping over regulations that apply to traditional currencies

There is actually at least one cryptocurrency working on becoming recognized as a legitimate currency; Nano.

> in areas where it is about tech we see superior one winning over established players all the time.

People could immediately see that Google gave better search results; that WhatsApp was instant and free; and I don't think AMD is as clearcut an example as you state.

Notice that in my comment I stated the condition that people can't understand the tech by themselves - such is the case with crypto. People can't understand the proofs; the difference between POW, POS, and Block Lattice; whether a coin is decentralized or not, etc, just by using it.

Arguing against myself a bit, I did think people would notice how slow and expensive their BTC transactions were; or how awkward setting an account up is, or how often claimed roadmap milestones were put back - but they haven't. I don't think I accounted for the sheer volume and reach of bag holders and maxis.

BTC uses the same amount of power as Argentina - it's perverse. The people claiming it's better in any way, on any metric outside adoption are just wrong. The fact that BTC holders and miners can claim otherwise, and people apparently believe them, is kinda my whole point.

It feels like there's a strong parallel with QC, or nuclear energy, or even cannabis. People get deluded by hype from vested interests if they have no way to accurately judge for themselves.

Re: The quantum computing bubble

#84

Post by denton-scratch »

krastanov wrote: post #64
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not actually early technology, it's been developed since the 80's. And if the underlying theories are unsound - if it doesn't even work in theory - then putting more money in won't make it magically viable.

1. Seems a bit unfair to say it has been developed since the 80's. In 80's a couple of people (e.g. Feynman) noticed that if you have a quantum simulator, you can simulate chemistry in a way that a classical computer is seemingly incapable of. But the transmon (one of the first possibly viable implementations of a qubit) was not developed until the 00's and complete control of some of these systems (e.g. transmon cou…

> e.g. Liquid Crystal displays

Liquid crystal displays were commercially viable 10 years before they became commercially available.

Source: my dad worked for a company that made display tubes for CRT manufacturers all over the world. He told me back in the seventies that they knew how to make TVs you could hang on the wall like a picture, but weren't making them because they were camping on a lucrative market.

Re: The quantum computing bubble

#85

Post by curt15 »

sfpotter wrote: post #62
aqme28 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It wasn't? The article leads with that argument. "The reality is that none of these companies — or any other quantum computing firm, for that matter — are actually earning any real money." I don't see any argument that the technology is fundamentally unsound or doesn't scale, even though that's an argument I'm pretty amenable to.

"The simple reason for this is that despite years of effort nobody has yet come close to building a quantum machine that is actually capable of solving practical problems. The current devices are so error-prone that any information one tries to process with them will almost instantly degenerate into noise. The problem only grows worse if the computer is scaled up (ie, the number of “qubits” increased)." + 5 subsequen…

Some quantum error correcting codes were recently demonstrated experimentally: https://physics.aps.org/articles/v15/103

Re: The quantum computing bubble

#86

Post by denton-scratch »

lumost wrote: post #74
throw149102 wrote: post #71

One point of interest was the paper on quantum computing applied to quantum chemistry[1]. In that paper, they did not find generic exponential speedup for a list of chemistry problems with current quantum algorithms. There are 3 problems with this: a speedup does not need to be exponential in order to be incredibly valuable; a speedup does not need to be extremely generic, just enough to cover real-world use cases; a…

The reason exponential speedups are required is due to the extreme cost of quantum computing R&D and extremely limited quantum computers that come out of it. I can provision 1k CPU based servers or ~20 4x GPU based servers in a cloud computing environment for an hour for <$400. These are mature technologies with massive economies of scale behind them. A quantum computer needs to not only outperform scale out GPU/CPU…

> The reason exponential speedups are required is due to the extreme cost of quantum computing R&D and extremely limited quantum computers that come out of it.

Hmmm. I'm no mathematician; but I thought the value of an "exponential speedup" is if you are trying to solve a problem with "exponential complexity".

I don't know if "exponential compexity" is a thing; I'm pretty sure "exponential speedup" isn't. Is it correct to say that a quantum factoring machine has an "exponential speedup"? Isn't it more accurate to say that the exponential difficulty is a property of the classical algorithms, not of the problem itself?

Re: The quantum computing bubble

#87

Post by denton-scratch »

wikfwikf wrote: post #77
oldgradstudent wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’s like, at a vacuum tube era, at best. How is it even remotely close? Vacuum tubes were a thriving industry, producing many groundbreaking products and services.

They are saying that quantum computing is at the stage that classical computing was at when it still relied on vacuum tubes. Not that quantum computing is at the same stage as the vacuum tube industry was at at some unspecified time.

It still doesn't wash. Vacuum tube computers were used in WWII to compute artillery tables. That presumably changed (or ended) lives.

I don't think it's a reasonable comparison at all.

Re: The quantum computing bubble

#88

Post by marcosdumay »

sweezyjeezy wrote: post #82
marcosdumay wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Right now there is no clear use-case Why people keep repeating that? You mean that if somebody creates a machine that can simulate chemistry and materials science in polynomial time, nobody would use it? That's crazy.

The key word being 'if' - cited research from the FT article that disclaims this: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2208.02199.pdf I have no expertise in QC/chemistry so I can't make a judgement other than to say it doesn't seem universally agreed that QC will be a silver bullet here.

That's quite similar to claiming that quantum computers won't change anything for RSA cryptography, because we never had any proof that integer factorization can't be done in polynomial time on a classical computer.

It's true, in some sense.

Re: The quantum computing bubble

#89

Post by ptero »

chrisweekly wrote: post #69
ptero wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not the amount of funding, it is the allocation that doomed R&D at big companies. Forty years ago they were the best game in town for applied research (defining applied as, on success, having a fast track to commercialization). Later it became similar to the university research: on success, you write some articles, get company wows, but business people have no idea where to stick it and half heartedly throw a f…

+1 Insightful. Also, in the spirit of helpfulness, "passed over" is the wrong turn of phrase as used here; it implies "declined or rejected" (as in, being passed over for a promotion at work). I think "surpassed" or "leap-frogged" are closer to your intended meaning. HTH! :)

Agreed, thank you! I appreciate corrections for my non-native english speakerness :)

Re: The quantum computing bubble

#90

Post by cerol »

sicp-enjoyer wrote: post #81
cerol wrote: post #39

This is how I think about it. It's insurance money. If you're a manager of a big company like IBM, Microsoft or Google, you have to align your current product portfolio and future portfolio in such a way that shows your investor that your company will keep growing, even if your current products are stagnant. You can surely say Quantum computing won't do much in next 5 years. But what about 10 years? 20 years? 30 year…

I think you are describing the company dynamics accurately, but I can't help think this is just a terrible way to invest. No party has a concrete plan or vision for how to use it, they just throw money because there is a consensus of good feeling around it. Those good feelings were probably created through academic or corporate marketing efforts in the first place.

> but I can't help think this is just a terrible way to invest

Picking a company to invest in only half the job, choosing how much to invest is the other half.

It's a terrible way to invest if you put all your money into it. QC "changing the world" is a tail-end event. You allocate according to the risk.

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